... (c) www.lobster-magazine.co.uk (Issue 40) Winter 2000/1 Last| Contents| Next Issue 40 Rebranding SIS Corinne Souza SIS is dead- you read it first in Lobster- but the funeral has not been announced. Established in 1909, it will not make its centenary. SIS once offered a global brand operating in a market that had been previously divided along the lines of accepted cartels (market fixing). Its market-share, however, has been under threat for years from surviving members of the cartel; and they have all been under threat from new, sophisticated arrivals. Anything that damages the brand- supposedly offering alternative worlds and values- kills it. Those ...

... (c) www.lobster-magazine.co.uk (Issue 42) Winter 2001/2 Last| Contents| Next Issue 42 SIS: Dearlove, Spedding and PR Corinne Souza In October the US Government hired advertising doyenne Charlotte Beers as Under-Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs. (1) She intended 'commissioning research into the Arab mentality', confirming what we already knew: the American Government has so little respect for its many Arab/Muslim citizens, it has had to commission research into who they are. Had the American government even a modicum of respect for some of its own electorate/taxpayers, apart from being good manners (something Arabs/Muslims have in abundance), ...

... Some agent protection issues and more comment on SIS PR Corinne Souza SIS lifestyle management services A ll intelligence organisations can provide expertise and insider knowledge of a personal nature to staff, agents and favoured others. This may range from the mundane: home repairs carried out by vetted suppliers, say, to the more glitzy, for example access to exclusive clubs and events without reference to a waiting list. The equivalent in the private sector is provided to wealthy clients by banks, PR agencies and what are called concierge service companies offering a 'lifestyle management service' as a product. 'Destination specialists' can offer the same assistance overseas. The SIS has always offered this type of service ...

... The SIS and London-based foreign dissidents: some patterns of espionage Corinne Souza Over forty years separates the arrival of the Iraqi community in London and today's Russian one. Some of the Iraqis making their home in the UK in the 1970s had substantial wealth, others were averagely well-to-do, and some had little more than the clothes in which they stood. For the most part they were fleeing for their lives and as a community, made up of many communities, kept a low profile. This holds true today. The low profile strategy, for all its divisions and tensions – now under more stress following the arrival of post invasion Iraqis – allowed the community, and its children ...

... (c) www.lobster-magazine.co.uk (Issue 48) Winter 2004 Last| Contents| Next Issue 48 After Iraq: some FCO/SIS issues Corinne Souza When falsehoods are bared, we have to be alert to those that will take their place as well as the ones that remain concealed.(1) At the time of writing (October 2004), the deluge of media coverage on the false justifications for the Iraq war – now understandably giving way to greater anxieties about the well-being of British troops – has led to widespread public recognition of intelligence failure, without balanced apportionment of blame. This has served to obfuscate one of the real problems: over the years 'intelligence' has ...

... Contents Lobster 60 Sir John Sawer's speech and some aspects of SIS PR Corinne Souza An article in Lobster ten years ago claimed that SIS would not see its centenary (1909-2009). Lobster was right. SIS Chief Sir John Sawer's speech on 28 October 2010 – a public first – was a closing statement, even if the new chief cleverly made it look like an opening one.1 In much the same way as the influence of 'big oil' is in decline because, with the exception of Washington, everybody else recognised the environment debate, so too has 'big' espionage collapsed. The last of the Cold War spook agencies with leading brand status to topple in ignominy like the ...

... wooing the money-lenders he was a member of the Steering Committee of the Bilderberg Group, in the inner circle;(2) and Bilderberg has been one of the leading forums promoting the transnational, American-dominated New World Order which is now wrecking the world. Then there was Smith's life-long friendship with Baroness (Meta) Ramsay, the former career SIS officer, with whom he became friends at university. She became President of the Scottish Union of Students and went on to a career in the murky world of Cold War international student politics prior to joining SIS. Private Eye 973 of 2 April 1999 noted that Jack Straw, while an official of the National Union of Students, visited ...

... (c) www.lobster-magazine.co.uk (Issue 29) June 1995 Last| Contents| Next Issue 29 The Perfect English Spy Tom Bower, Heinemann, London This is the biography of Dick White, the only man to have been head of both MI5 and MI6 (SIS) and it is a massive breach of the new Official Secrets Act. For Bower not only had access to White's memoir of the period, with White to vouch for him, he spoke to 'dozens' of former officers, mostly SIS, all of whom have broken their 'duty of confidentiality', or whatever the exact form of words it was that the Thatcher government came up with against Peter Wright. In ...

... creation of the Intelligence and Security Committee. With members who either knew nothing about the subject, or who, like chair Tom King, had been part of the system as a minister, said committee had investigated nothing of consequence and issued a number of anodyne reports. No new revelatory horrors seemed to be on the horizon. MI5 and SIS had got their new buildings- rewards for the miners' strike and Gordievsky, respectively- through the Whitehall system before the cuts began to fall, and were both branching out into new areas. MI5 were even generating new kinds of 'subversives'- animal rights campaigners, ecowarriors, roads protesters- to help replace the domestic Soviet 'threat ...

... Britain remained a 'Great Power' despite having had to asset strip the Empire to pay for the war is one of his major themes. But, in his view, the illusion was sustained by the politicians, and not by the Civil Service- what he calls 'the permanent government'- and certainly not by the secret Civil Service, SIS (MI6). For Verrier's second thesis, the one I guess he really cares about, is that SIS got it right. There it is, out front, in the final paragraph of his introduction. "Both SIS and the Security Service ..have officers with as keen a sense of realities as the most sceptical student of Britain's ...